Ordinarily, smelling like sawdust, sweat, diesel, and whiskey is a sign of a hell of a good day. I’m not going to lie, like many Southerners, I get pretty excited about a coming storm. It feeds many needs, from my increasingly old-man tendency to obsess over the weather to a love of being well prepared. If that storm delivers and I can justify having several chainsaws and a Jeep? Even better. But I wasn’t prepared for Helene. No one was.
On Wednesday night the rain started, a thousand-year event that would end up dumping nearly eight inches in twenty-four hours (almost a quarter of our average annual rainfall in a single day). All of this and we were still twenty-four hours from Helene’s arrival.
The actual devastation of Helene was slow to unfold for my family. When we lost signal around 9:00 a.m. on Friday it seemed like a hiccup. Then we watched from our living room window as six white pines toppled in our backyard, leaning over like candles in a cake with too much frosting. At the time, this seemed like a big deal. Our view had been drastically changed. It was a real shame, until it wasn’t.
When the storm eased around noon, we emerged to see a huge tree down on our power line. I was worried at that point that I wasn’t going to be able to watch Alabama beat Georgia the next day. But as I walked to check on neighbors, the real destruction began to dawn on me. Scores of fallen trees had crushed roofs, cars, and power lines. Thankfully, everyone was safe in our twelve-house neighborhood. We were fortunate.
But we had no idea what the outside world held. I knew I had to get to my parents’ house to check on them, so we loaded chainsaws, axes, and straps into the Jeep. I made it to the first major intersection (okay, it’s just a stop sign), which held the next clue of the power of the storm. A creek I could normally jump over had completely destroyed the culvert and the road. There was just a gap where the bridge used to be. A slow drive over many power lines and branches revealed missing bridge after missing bridge, as if the Department of Transportation had finished all of the roads and hadn’t gotten around to putting in bridges quite yet.
What followed was devastation like I have never seen. I have experienced more hurricanes than I can count and even the unbelievable power of a category 5 tornado that ripped through Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 2011. This was a different scale. Those disasters all had a line of demarcation, and you knew you could get out of the disaster zone relatively quickly. But as I drove down 74A, it was destruction as far as I could see from the top of the mountain.
The normal route to my parents’ house was blocked, so I tried to take a shortcut through the Walmart parking lot. Only it was no longer a parking lot, it was a river, and not a river you see forming in parking lots when it rains hard. It was THE river, in this case the Swannanoa, a sleepy waterway usually twenty to thirty feet wide. Now it looked like the muddy Mississippi. Fortunately, the I-240 bridge over the Swannanoa was unaffected and we were able to pick our way through a back neighborhood thanks to the many people who had come together and cut a path. We found my parents safe.
As the local radio stations banded together to start to get news out (thank you to all of those at iHeartMedia that kept us connected), we began to grasp the devastation, and to know that the landscape would never be the same again.
We had prepared for the storm, but we couldn’t have prepared for the impacts to our community. There are so many facts and figures that are hard to comprehend. There are the most important ones: Lost lives, homes, businesses, even entire towns. As I write this, hundreds of people are still missing. Then there are ones that in this modern society are hard to believe. We started the day on September 26 with four major interstates on which to leave Asheville in any cardinal direction we wanted (I-26 north and south and I-40 east and west). By the afternoon of the 27th, three of those were gone, either by landslide or river.
Many of the gems that make Western North Carolina so special are also gone. The towns of Chimney Rock and Hot Springs, both beloved tourist destinations, are basically no more. Likewise, the River Arts District in Asheville and the town of Marshall, both hotspots for arts and culture, are devastated beyond belief. I can’t imagine that people will want to invest in those areas anytime soon. One of my favorite places in the world to hike and enjoy biodiversity, the Hickory Nut Gorge, is apparently impenetrable from landslides. Pictures on the news may show destruction, but they don’t show the holes created in our communities. They don’t show the lost jobs and even entire industries that sustain our people. When New Belgium came to town and built a major brewery along the river, it felt like an economic turning point in Asheville. I don’t know the fate of that facility, but I know it had at least several feet of water in it and likely sustained millions of dollars in damage.
As I write this, we are still in the middle of it. I will have to drive up the mountain to get a cell signal to send this story out. It is surreal to constantly hear helicopters, sirens, and generators for days on end. To know that the governor of North Carolina and even the president of the United States are flying over, as are people much less fortunate. As my wife puts it, it feels like Covid, like one day we are going to wake up and realize it was all a bad dream. Unfortunately, as with Covid, it’s going to take years to return to normalcy.
Ironically, this summer Asheville became the place I’ve lived the longest in my life. Our son was born here; we’ve started businesses, lived our lives, and built community. I’ve worked for years to conserve the area’s wildlife and have gotten to enjoy the many natural and cultural wonders that hide in the nooks and crannies of the Southern Appalachians. In short, this is home. If this region has shown me anything, it is that it is resilient—from the forests to the people.
As a conservation biologist, I know there are times to leave things alone and let them recover and there are times to intervene. For Western North Carolina, this is the latter. In my career spent working with endangered species, I have strived to tie together local actions with larger strategies. The recovery of Western North Carolina is going to be no different.
I have seen immense strength in the local communities: People cutting trees off neighbors’ houses, sharing food and water, doing whatever it takes to make sure everyone gets by. That is no surprise to any of us who live here. The strength and personality of these communities were forged centuries ago, and those traits will serve us well on the path ahead. However, there is a huge need for support beyond our mountaintops and hollers. The economic devastation is going to be immense, and we will need help from larger and more strategic organizations for both immediate recovery efforts and long-term revival.
For three-hundred-plus years, the story of the Southern Appalachians has been one of resource extraction. The mountains always had something we needed as a society, whether that was spruce trees or coal, so we took it to win wars and grow the economic engine of our nation without reinvesting into the communities. Helene is a chance to change that narrative. I sincerely hope we can come together to rebuild this region better and more resilient, because a stronger Southern Appalachia is a stronger South. And a stronger South is a stronger nation.
